Posts Tagged ‘Christian Science Monitor’

From THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR Thursday, August 21, 1958 by Philip Hyde

(The original article appeared on the front page of the second section and incorporated five large black and white photographs by Philip Hyde)

Grass On Tarn, Sierra Nevada High Country, Kings Canyon National Park, California, 1951 by Philip Hyde. This was one of the photographs with the original Christian Science Monitor article, "Why Not Walk?" by Philip Hyde.

Next time you visit one of our national parks, why not try walking? If this proposal seems startling to you in this mechanized age, you might consider some of the qualities that make up the natural scene that is observed in our system of national parks.

One of the most rewarding aspects of nature is the exquisite beauty found in minutiae: the patterns of snow-flakes, the form of a tiny butterfly, or the interlaced perfection of leaf forms. None of these are easily observed from a moving automobile, yet most visitors to our nature preserves depend primarily on wheeled locomotion to “see” the parks.

You can look at the grand landscapes in the parks through the windshield. But to really see them you must get out of the car, at least enough to look at the foreground.

No mountain is so grand that knowing its foreground of small stones, tiny plants, and even the animals that inhabit it does not enhance its grandeur. For the natural world is not a miscellaneous collection of unrelated pieces, but a unified, harmonious whole, interacting and inter-dependent.